THE PROGRAM OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO ARMY ORGANISATION

When the formation of the Red Army was first begun, the formation of the army which sprang from the proletarian Red Guards, the mensheviks and the social revolutionaries fiercely attacked the communists, declaring that the latter were false to the watchword of the general arming of the people, and accusing them of creating a standing army consisting of only one class. But the fact that civil war cannot last forever, makes it obvious that the Red Army cannot be a standing army. The real reason why our army is a class army is because the class struggle has reached the last extremity of bitterness. No one but a petty-bourgeois utopist, no one who is not hopelessly stupid, can object to the existence of a class army while recognising the class war. It is characteristic that the bourgeoisie, in this epoch which has ensued upon the settlement of the world war, no longer thinks it necessary, or even possible, to conceal the class character of its army. Most instructive, in this connexion, has been the fate of the standing army in Germany, Britain, and France. The German National Assembly was elected by universal suffrage. Its main support was Noske’s force of volunteer counter-revolutionary troops. At the stage of the embitterment of the class struggle and at the stage of the decay of bourgeois society which Germany has now reached, it is impossible that an army based on universal military service can be used for the maintenance of bourgeois institutions. Similarly in France and Britain, during the year 1919 the government was mainly dependent upon the support, not of the army which had been raised by universal service and had gained the victory in the great war, but upon a voluntary force of counter-revolutionary soldiers and police. Thus, not merely in Russia from the close of 1917, but likewise all over Europe from the close of 1918, a characteristic phenomenon was the abandonment of universal military service and the adoption of a system of class armies. In Russia, the traitors to socialism the mensheviks and the social revolutionaries — were strongly opposed to the formation of the Red Army of the proletariat, at the very time when in Central Europe their friends Noske and Scheidemann were organising the White Army of the bourgeoisie.